Review of Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions
Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deduction - To go from one of the most classic franchises to a tongue-in-cheek series that is a precursor to this show, I'm really left with this thought in my mind: does the author REALLY know how to make Shonen works stand the test of time? To the classic AniManga connoisseurs, I'm pretty sure that the name of Akira Amano is no stranger to you. The female mangaka best known for her series Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, which was featured in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump as one of the top guns alongside the Big 3 at the time, is now, over 20 years later,a franchise that I can recommend to anyone wanting to experience a true and pure classic Shonen series. But her later series of the sci-fi adventure ēlDLIVE which (for some reason) was also serialized in the same publishing company's Shonen Jump+ spin-off, garnered a teeny-tiny fraction of her previous juggernaut series, and even with Studio Pierrot's Winter 2017 anime, it really didn't do much for the community expecting something new out of the acclaimed mangaka.
With the failure of ēlDLIVE, while sticking to the same publication platform, comes the brand-new gob-smacking mystery crime series in the form of Kamonohashi Ron no Kindan Suiri a.k.a Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deduction, released in October 2020, with Diomedea's anime adaptation just 3 years later. And the series, despite the recommendation from Takarajimasha's Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! a.k.a This Mystery is Excellent!'s winning mystery writers, with one of them (Sako Aizawa) praising the series as "an "authentic mystery manga for the new era" with its fast pacing, as well as the tricks and logic used to identify the culprit", the anime (and its manga source material) may not be neither bad nor garbage, but is rather bland and mediocre, and a draggy slog to sit through.
What Akira Amano has done here in this series is to take the ever-so-loving tried-and-true formula of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and give it her take of the Shonen genre by mashing the personalities of both protagonist (Sherlock Holmes) and antagonist (William James Moriarty) into one person, and that's how we get the series' titular character: Ron Kamonohashi, the aforementioned deranged private detective with an affinity to send culprits to their deaths once the confessions are sounded. This, coupled with the fact that he was involved in an incident where he was found guilty, resulted in his detective license being revoked and him being expelled from the detective training academy, thus isolating him in the process. His saviour, who would get him back into sleuthing, is the rather unremarkable Totomaru "Toto" Isshiki, assigned by his superior Amamiya of the Metropolitan Police Department. Toto looks the part of a typical police detective, though he's rather unrefined and looks cowardly at first glance. That is, until Amamiya requested him to look for Ron, to which he slowly improved his craft, playing the part of Holmes's assistant John Watson, sometimes becoming like Holmes himself, and setting the goal of avoiding Ron's supernatural killing instinct for the culprits.
The problem with the entire series, as much as it's being marketed as a Shonen work, is that it's pretty much bread and butter when it comes to detective works. Sure, you have your usual evildoer group that landed Ron being the bad guy in the first place, but the cases are very cookie-cutter to the point that no matter how the case looks and feels, it starts and ends exactly one and the same. There are slight movements when it comes to Ron's overarching motive to sniff out those responsible for his expulsion, but it's very methodical and slow at the same time. Even the other characters that come onboard to both Toto and Ron's sleuthing campaign are really nothing special, made worse by the fact that Akira Amano chose to stick to the tried-and-true tropes of what works and what doesn't and doesn't even improve on her writing at all. It's just a shame that even in ēlDLIVE that the mangaka herself was entering into new territory that feels cheap but fresh, but in the case of Ron Kamonohashi, it looks as if she has just completely given up on writing a compelling work, the likes of which we'll never see the Katekyou Hitman Reborn! revival once again in time to come.
The aspects where I have the least problems are with the production and music. In-house director Shota Ibata did decent with Diomedea on the production side of things, which looks good, but honestly, this is pretty much what I've expected for anything out of the studio. The music is also decent, with Unison Square Garden and Hockrockb's OP and ED songs, though not particularly memorable.
What's even worse is that we had a detective series in the form of novelist Yuugo Aosaki's Undead Girl Murder Farce last season, and I declared that as my new favourite detective series of all time, being a masterpiece work. So going forward, the detective sleuthing bar is quite high, and no matter how many seasons the production committee decides to pump out of this (since Season 2 has already seemingly been confirmed before the anime started), it'll never change my perception that Akira Amano's newest series, if you take it as anything BUT a detective-themed story, its comedy will definitely either be or not be for you.
Be it as it may, Akira Amano has already lost her magic, and Ron Kamonohashi, is an abject failure on a crime-solving mystery level. Such a shame, but I'm not surprised at all.